Chief coroner warns of more FEMA waste on funeral overpayments

Despite assurances from federal officials that they will change the way they award disaster funeral assistance, taxpayer money will likely still be wasted, Florida's chief medical examiner predicted Thursday.

After last year's hurricanes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid funeral expenses for more than 200 Floridians who died of cancer, AIDS, heart disease and other causes that had nothing to do with the storms, medical examiners found. FEMA announced a new policy last week tightening up some of its procedures but continues to allow family doctors to link deaths to a disaster.

"Nothing's changed," said Dr. Stephen Nelson, head of Florida's Medical Examiners Commission. "We'll be back to many more deaths than what we're counting as hurricane-related."

Meeting on Key Biscayne on Thursday, the commission announced preliminary results of its review of 306 of the 319 deaths resulting in FEMA payments. They found more than 200 cases that were not caused by the storms.As the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported Wednesday, FEMA paid cremation expenses for a Charlotte County man who died of liver cirrhosis five months after Hurricane Charley and for a Palm Beach Gardens heart patient who left an estate worth $2 million.

In response to disclosures in the Sun-Sentinel, the chairman of Florida's congressional delegation called Thursday for a "top to bottom investigation" into the funeral payments. "From all accounts, the process by which FEMA handled its funeral assistance program was a colossal failure," U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fort Lauderdale, wrote in a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. FEMA is part of Homeland Security.

Noting his "profound disappointment and disgust," Shaw demanded to know who signed off on the awards and why bogus claims were paid while municipalities throughout Florida are still waiting for millions of dollars in reimbursement from FEMA for cleanup costs.

In Palm Beach County alone, the governments of Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, West Palm Beach, Wellington and Jupiter are waiting for a combined total of nearly $20 million, city officials said.

"We are approaching the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Charley and we are still uncovering error after error in the agency's post-disaster procedures," Shaw wrote.

In an interview with the newspaper, Shaw said it appeared as though FEMA workers "were almost soliciting fraud" by encouraging relatives to apply for funeral assistance for deaths that bore no relation to the hurricanes.

In two instances, medical examiners found no death certificates for people FEMA paid to bury. "They didn't wash out to sea, we know that," Shaw said.

Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General said Thursday it will seek an explanation from FEMA on the cases with the missing death certificates.

For months, FEMA has said coroners are only one source for deciding whether a death is disaster-related. The agency has refused to share its criteria with the Medical Examiners Commission.

"FEMA is ignoring us," Nelson said. "FEMA's statement that their selection criteria is much more expansive than ours is just hooey."

The commission began looking into the FEMA death claims after the Sun-Sentinel reported in April that they were nearly three times higher than the official hurricane death toll.

The commission wrote to FEMA last month after learning the agency was "still paying for funeral expenses," Nelson said.

Medical examiners want to investigate those cases, too. They plan to complete their review in the coming weeks.

Nelson said FEMA should rely on medical examiners to determine whether a death is disaster-related.

"We are just going to have to agree to disagree," said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews, "since the Florida Medical Examiners do not set national disaster assistance policy."

Nelson said he hopes the commission's death review will "at least make the public aware ... that perhaps FEMA is pretty lax with the taxpayers' checkbook."

"Hopefully, the bright light of public opinion will shine on them," he said, "[and] they will see the folly and error of their ways."

Hurricane Frances, the 2004 Labor Day weekend storm, hit 100 miles north of Miami-Dade County, but Sun-Sentinel reporters found that the federal government approved $31 million in storm claims there for new furniture and clothes and thousands of televisions, microwaves, refrigerators and...